Published 4:00 am, Thursday, May 19, 2011

Paper.li, the startup that turns your Twitter and Facebook feeds into online newspapers, is announcing that they're adding former Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau to their board and refreshing their product with a bigger focus on self-expression.

When Paper.li got started, it was basically a way to read your Twitter profile: it would get all the links from the people you follow and put it together in a nice newspaper-like layout.

Now the focus is more on self-expression: the idea is for you to create and curate your own Paper.li newspapers out of the sources that interest you the most.

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We spoke to Hippeau this morning, who said that "what's exciting about Paper.li is that it takes self-expression to the next level. ... It allows you to publish with minimal friction about what interests you, and to assemble it in a familiar format." This is quite an endorsement for a publishing platform from the man who helmed the most successful blogging startup in history.

Hippeau denied that Paper.li competes with anyone, whether it's online media like Huffington Post (or Business Insider!) or more traditional self-expression platforms like Twitter. In fact the Paper.li use-case reminds us of nothing more than Tumblr, where you follow people on a dashboard and reblog them on your own site, sometimes even with a newspaper-like template. "Everybody's overlapping to some degree," Hippeau eventually conceded when pressed.

Paper.li co-founder/CEO Edouard Lambelet tells us Paper.li now gets 1.5 million monthly uniques, and that 300,000 Paper.li "newspapers" have been created, which is double what they had in January when we last spoke--impressive growth.